Macabre Magazine

  • The Hiding Place by Fen Welles

    The front door slams downstairs. If I hear whistling, it’s dad. If not, it’s her. I count my heartbeats in my throat. The sun has started its slow descent. The many-petaled leaves of the mimosa brush against the window screen like waves against the shore. Footsteps thunk across the floor toward the kitchen. No whistle. …

  • Last Night In Central Park by Arthur Davis

    Russell Hastings checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past eleven p.m. Central Park was cloaked in the darkness of an unseasonably warm October. He had just under seven hours left on his graveyard shift. A bag of sandwiches and a large thermos he stole from his grandfather years ago filled with diet soda…

  • Sam’s Son by Tom Kropp

    The day Sam’s son died was also Sam’s last day of freedom. Sam’s son was named Matt. Matt was ten years old and resembled his father’s good looks with dark hair and blue eyes. Sam was a tall lean man and Matt was a wiry athletic boy that was good in many sports. Matt’s favorite…

  • And Those Who Watch by Ron Dionne

    Nathan Blaustein was a short man, with narrow, seemingly inert ice blue eyes that nevertheless were penetrating. No one closely observing him as he stood mutely taking in his wife Bea’s histrionic distress would make the mistake of thinking him unfeeling. For there was something in the way he watched her, in the way the…

  • Excuse the Outburst by Hubble Stark

    When it comes to getting rid of your wife and best friend in one night, timing is everything. So many things can go wrong. So many threads need to align. But the truth is, I could have been an actor or director in another life. I recognize, unlike most, that everyone has their roles to…

  • Things that Live in the Walls by J. Hart

    There are things that live in the walls here, but they don’t tell you that in the welcome tour. Well, they don’t tell you about a lot of things before the state abandons you here for ‘defiance’. Twenty girls jammed in a too-small room. Clothes folded in the lockers but with no locks to keep…

  • The Shadow and the Wolf by D. V. Dorough

    When my campfire died, the darkness rushed in to devour me like a starved hunter. Scrunching my knees to my chest, I defensively pressed my back against the trunk of a gnarled oak tree. I could no longer feel my feet. “Be brave,” I whispered in my mind. I hated the thumping heartbeat in my…

  • Southeast by Nathan Poole Shannon

    It’s gone, I think. I can no longer hear the clicking sound it makes. Others like it chitter and call to others of their horrid kind. I have been hiding in the collapsed marquee of a theatre (Waiting for Godot was showing here in the before times, the lettering reads) waiting for the thing to…

  • A Little Bad Luck by Jim Foley

    On Thursday we killed everyone, and it was every bit as wonderful as she had hoped. But on Friday, the first day of our perfect new life together, I woke up with a bad feeling. Late morning sunlight slanted through arched balcony doors. I blinked at Marcia, sleeping next to me on a massive mahogany…

  • Root Work by Nekeshia Hayes

    Google this shit if you want to, but the park is a death trap—and no one seems to give a damn. Governor Healy proposed a “statewide resource” to improve coordination in missing persons cases. That’s it. A resource. Like we haven’t been losing people for decades in the same places, with the same unanswered questions.…